[from Chapter 1, "Nunc Dimittis Domine!"]
To see the sun go down beyond the Sepulchre and rise over
the mountain of the Ascension, to bare my forehead to the
cold dews of Gethsemane, and lave my dim eyes in the waters
of Siloam, to sleep in the company of the infinite host
above the oaks of Mamre, and to lie in the starlight of
Bethlehem and catch, however faintly, some notes of the
voices of the angels, to wash off the dust of life in the
Jordan, to cool my hot lips at the well of Samaria, to hear
the murmur of Gennesareth, giving me blessed sleep -- was
not all this worth dreaming of -- worth living for -- was
it not worth dying for?

And all this I was to accomplish -- not in some dim
future, but to-morrow -- to-morrow!

Yea, there lay Holy Land and thither my pilgrim feet
would carry me ere three suns had risen and set. [p. 2]

Think not lightly of this, my friend, for it is no light
matter to have seen the Holy City. I hesitated much before
I visited the Holy Land. I had always reasoned somewhat in
this way. If I were taught that the Son of God descended to
this earth, assuming the form of a child, and was the
reputed son of a carpenter in an American village; that he
lived here, walked these streets, preached at these
corners, slept in the nights on the hills of Long Island
and New Jersey, and was finally mobbed in the public
places, tried for some alleged crime, condemned and
executed here; if, I say, all this were taught me, I should
find it much more difficult to believe than I now do the
story of his life and death in a distant land, over which
tradition and history have cast a holy radiance. I
therefore feared much that when I had walked the streets of
Jerusalem, had climbed the sides of Olivet, had rested in
the garden of Gethsemane, and visited the Holy Sepulchre,
my faith in the divinity of the Saviour and the
authenticity of his mission, might be seriously
impaired.

Far otherwise was the reality.

Every step that I advanced on the soil of Palestine
offered some new and startling evidence of the truth of the
sacred story. Every hour we were exclaiming that the
history must be true, so perfect was the proof before our
eyes. The Bible was a new book, faith in which seemed now
to have passed into actual sight, and every page of its
record shone out with new, and a thousand fold increased
lustre.

The Bible had, of course, been our only guide-book.
There is no other -- and the publication of another will
tend materially to decrease the interest of travel in
Syria. He who shall visit Holy Soil with Murray's proposed
red book in his hands will know nothing of the keen
pleasure that we experienced in studying out for ourselves
the localities of sacred incident, or the intense delight
that flashed across our minds when we found those startling
confirmations of the truth of the story -- startling,
because unexpected and wholly original.

Sitting on the side of Mount Moriah, it was with new
force we read that exquisite passage in the 46th Psalm,
"There is a river the streams whereof shall make glad the
city of God, the holy place of the tabernacles of the Most
High;" which had its origin unquestionably in the beautiful
fountain that springs under the very rocks of Moriah . . .
[pp. 313-15]